The life of St Poemen the Great
He became known less for feats of extreme austerity, of which the desert already had many practitioners, than for a gift of plain, humane spiritual counsel that drew monks and laypeople alike to seek him out; asked once how the brothers should treat a monk who kept falling asleep during prayer, other elders wanted him startled awake, but Poemen simply said he would rather take the dozing brother's head onto his own knees and let him rest. In 407 raiders swept through Scetis and scattered its community, and Poemen, together with a fellow monk named Anoub and a small group of companions, fled south to Terenuthis on the Nile, carrying with him not relics or possessions but the accumulated wisdom of the community he had known. It is largely through Poemen and this same circle of exiles that the great collection later known as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers took the shape it has come down to us in, and no single elder is quoted in it more often than he is; more than a seventh of its alphabetical collection carries his name. He is remembered less as an ascetic hero than as a shepherd, the meaning of his own name, who taught mercy toward the weak as insistently as he taught discipline toward oneself.
